Amol Rajan: Apple is the master of trumping the inventors

Earlier this year, and without meaning to, Apple’s CEO explained how industrial revolutions happen. “It means more to us to get it right,” Tim Cook said, “than to be first.” This was the principle that animated his predecessor, Steve Jobs, and made Apple the biggest company in the world, a position it has struggled to maintain since Jobs’s death but which it is likely to recover after its thrilling product launches this week.

Like all great thinkers, Jobs and Cook understood not only that there is no such thing as an original idea but that refining other people’s ideas has a glory of its own. Apple products, so dominant, are improvements on someone else’s version.

Personal, graphic-driven computers, operated by mouse, existed before the Macintosh was launched in 1984; but Apple’s was better. Digital music players were around before iPods; but Apple’s was better. Nokia and other companies produced smartphones at least seven years before the iPhone; but Apple’s was better. As for tablets, Windows-based versions were around for a decade before the iPad — but that tablet trumped them all.

This week Apple made a big play for wearable technology, with the Apple Watch, and money transfer, with Apple Pay. Predictably, both of these have predecessors; but by refining design to make their use enjoyable, locking customers into an ecosystem of products where use of one depends on the other, and through market share and sheer willpower, Apple will doubtless make these two innovations a success too. In revenue terms, even they, of course, will bring in peanuts compared to the iPhone 6.

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Being so clear and consistent, there are naturally lessons in this corporate story for entrepreneurs, innovators and policy-makers alike. Those lessons were largely given in an article by Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr for America’s National Bureau of Economic Research, published in April 2011, and applied to Apple for The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell.

These economists, Gladwell argued, showed that the industrial revolution took place in Britain rather than France, say, or Germany because Britain was uniquely well endowed with “tweakers”. This country, Gladwell writes, “had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them.” Men, that is, like Jobs and Cook. Under them, Apple has instigated a minor industrial revolution.

I agree with Gladwell. Yesterday the Chancellor was at Manchester University to announce the setting up of the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre, obviously inserted into his diary after this column lauded graphene a few weeks ago. His “march of the makers” was meant to revive manufacturing. There are signs of progress, yet if there is to be another British industrial revolution it may be the result of a related phenomenon, the triumph of the tweakers.

Most cultures ascribe huge glory to inventors, casting them as the people who make history surge forward. But their ideas are mere orphans until an engineer gets hold of them. When you buy your next Apple product, remember someone else had made a version of it that you didn’t want.